Considering that wartime rationing continued years – about a decade, if memory serves – I can only imagine that there were many people in UK who were scratching their heads in wonderment over the fact that they still needed ration cards to buy things, when they’d been on the winning side.
There were shortages in the States, too, but this was due mostly to pent-up demand for things like cars and certain other items that hadn’t been manufactured since 1941. There was also a housing shortage, and of various consumer products like beer in some locales. Such shortages led to a generally high inflation rate in the postwar years–astonishingly high for certain individual years considering that Bretton-Woods was in effect.
None of these difficulties is comparable to what people in the UK and the Continent were going through, of course.
Call The Midwife is set in a very poor area of London [Poplar] , which remains (relatively) poor today, with many social problems - just different ones to the ones back then.
Britain got a third more in Marshall Aid than West Germany, and spent much of it propping up the sterling area.
As compared to the losing side, for which ration cards were useless since there was little to buy, and for whom the only food available at all was donated or supplied by their former enemies.
The idea of former enemies doing anything positive other than ransacking, looting and raping is entirely a modern invention inspired by civilization and humanitarianism.
I will go so far as to say that helping out occupied Japan, the UK and freed Europe defined the first part of the 1950’s.
Homosexuality was considered a sin, an evil act, and a mental disorder! Practically nobody was “out” until the Stonewall riots of 1969. Sodomy was illegal, as was cross-dressing.
Any woman who was raped would be accused of asking for it. Her sexual past could be used in court, but the rapist’s could not.
Women were not allowed to sign a contract or borrow money without a male co-signer. There were tales of women using senile male relatives as co-signers–apparently the only qualification was having a penis!
An excellent book and a good read on the subject is Stephen King’s 11/22/1963.
My mom got a certificate as an LVN (Licensed Vocational Nurse) and although she never worked full time after I was born (1956), she always kept the license up. One day when she was doing the paperwork for it, she mentioned that the LVN program was developed to allow married women to enter some kind of nursing program. For the RN program, women had to live in the dorms and Mom’s take on it was that the RN students had to be single because that separation would be too hard on a marriage. Of course, Mom often had assumptions about people’s reasons for doing things that were, um, let’s say ideosyncratic.
Ann Landers started her column in 1955. She was asked on her 40th anniversary what subjects she had changed her mind on the most. She replied spousal abuse and divorce (she urged women to stay with their husbands come hell or high water until she got letters describing "what hell on earth was really like and how high the waters could rise) and homosexuality (she originally considered it a mental disorder, but later realized it wasn’t and people should “live and let love.”